A New Year

Mar 25, 2019 — In early 2007 the UCLA Film & Television Archive received a call from Hollywood Film and Video announcing that the lab was, sadly, closing—and clearing its vaults in two days’ time. Anything left was doomed to the dumpster. The next...

Dec 3, 2018 — True Stories, David Byrne’s 1986 paean to American eccentricity and ordinariness, called to me from the shelves of a video store in Austin, Texas. Subtitled “A Film About a Bunch of People in Virgil, Texas,” True Stories is not “true”...

Aug 27, 2018 — Theater and movie audiences laughed at his one-liners throughout the 1960s and ’70s.

May 3, 2018 — Depth, beauty, curiosity—what gave luminous French star Danielle Darrieux staying power across eight decades? Critic Farran Smith Nehme looks for the answer in two films from opposite ends of her career.

Apr 5, 2018 — Variety’s Elsa Keslassy broke the story yesterday, and now the Cannes Film Festival has confirmed it: Asghar Farhadi’s Everybody Knows with Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem will open the seventy-first edition on May 8. Shot “in Spanish on the Iberian...

Mar 22, 2018 — David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return comes in at #1 on the Cinema Scope Top Ten of 2017 and, as editor Mark Peranson points out, all the other titles on the list have been covered in past...

Feb 7, 2018 — “Paul Clipson, the San Francisco-based experimental filmmaker once described as a ‘poet of cinema,’ died unexpectedly Saturday at the age of fifty-three,” reports Kevin L. Jones for KQED. “Clipson made dozens of short films and collaborated frequently with experimental musicians...

Jan 22, 2018 — New York. There’s a celebration going on at the Quad Cinema through Wednesday, A Journey Through Cinema: Ten Years of the Cohen Media Group. At Screen Slate, Caroline Golum picks out Maurice Pialat’s Loulou (1980) from the program to spotlight,...

Nov 13, 2017 — Angela Watercutter’s interview with Steven Soderbergh is actually a sidebar to her piece for Wired on the making of Mosaic—not the browser that put the World Wide Web in the global spotlight back in 1993, but the iOS app that...

Oct 8, 2017 — Lady Bird screens at the New York Film Festival this evening and tomorrow night, and we begin with Filmmaker’s Scott Macaulay: “Greta Gerwig makes her directorial debut with this controlled, coolly compassionate and autobiographical-feeling post-9/11 teenage tale. Saoirse Ronan plays...